The energy industry has many problems transitioning from fossil reliance to renewables.
Any energy transition is a massive shift in the energy supply.
As our energy consumption continues rising, we face several global challenges. The primary sources of our energy production will need to change as carbon emissions and warming greenhouse gases continue to amass in the planet’s atmosphere, creating a more unstable world we live in today. Traditionally, we have been heavily dependent on mainly three types of fossil fuels in use for energy generation: coal, oil and natural gas are all non-renewable sources, depleting the planet’s resources.
The continued burning of fossil fuels for electricity, heat, and transportation is giving levels of carbon intensity that need to be dramatically reversed as this continues to put pressure on rising temperatures and a warming planet. We have this real need for an effective energy transition built on electricity supplied by renewables. Renewable energy sources offer cleaner alternatives based on solar, wind power, hydroelectric energy, biomass from plants, hydrogen and fuel cells and geothermal power.
We need to build different energy solutions to resolve the current grid difficulties of accommodating variable power sources like wind and solar energy, the fastest-growing renewable power sources. As these resources begin to supply increasing percentages of power to the grid, integrating them into grid operations will become increasingly difficult.
Our present energy grids are partly to blame for their out-of-date design and the reliance on fossil fuels to power them. Most of today’s grids were built early in the last century and work on a central distribution model with minimal flexibility to adapt to alternative energy sources or sudden outages. We rely on large-scale energy grids designed over many decades of upgrades and simply fixing and patching, and these are not up for the job to deal with the challenges of increased power demand. They are very carbon-intensive.
The energy transition is about reducing carbon emissions. Globally it is recognized electrification from renewable sources becomes central to reducing carbon. Carbon emission reductions are necessary for new transportation solutions and our energy supply needs for industry and cities.
We do have real alternatives through renewables.
Renewables are overcoming many challenges to make them economically viable, taking those surrounding our grid infrastructure.
Firstly, there is a physical reality that the wind, solar, and geothermal resources often are located in remote places or reliant on the sun or weather conditions. This has significant logistical issues in delivering power and minimising the loss of power in transmissions.
Secondly, energy distribution radically needs to change to efficiently distribute the power from renewable to where much of the power demand is, in urban city areas, and this has significant infrastructure issues to resolve to switch from central power generation to distribute and bidirectional sources.
Thirdly, a new strategy for providing storage capacity will be central to this ability to switch to renewables, and this conversion to electricity, we lose central inverters and inertia to keep the power “on” and need to build local storage to accommodate power surges and variable electricity flows.
Fourthly, we must build electric superhighways that provide power infrastructure radically different from the past to meet future demand. As electricity demand rapidly rises, our existing grid infrastructure cannot cope without massive overhauls and different transmission solutions.
Our new energy sources of supply are being designed to be bi-directional, so power utilities, intermediaries, or final consumers can all play their part in managing their role in generating and managing electricity. This two-way energy flow allows for returning to the grid excess capacity, offering very different business models than the past for new pricing models that are increasingly flexible, challenging the past, often monopolistic positions of one energy provider.
The challenge is building a global consensus of understanding for an effective energy transition.
Energy sourcing as they become more decentralized and more open to the competition, where more energy options will rapidly change the market for different competitive models. Smart Infrastructure, Storage, and Smart Grid solutions are changing the dynamics within the energy supply. Solutions today for energy storage and distribution solutions are being designed to help smooth out the variability in wind and solar resources and progressively phase out fossil fuels as technology solutions will make them easier to use and in cost solutions.
The economic and political will globally is the key to rapid change. The need to rapidly “ramp up” our renewable sources of energy, mainly from solar, wind, hydroelectric, biomass from plants, hydrogen and fuel cells, and geothermal power, is possible so we will be able to make better use of various energy resources to achieve this energy transition that is needed.
We need far greater collaboration and investment in building a new energy infrastructure for the future built on renewables and all their variability. Predictability is not simply on market planning and evaluating potential demand; it needs to be more in real-time, reliant on a constant stream of data streaming into control points to send power to where it is needed on time and every time.
